LOGLINE

Along his final delivery job, a young thief finds himself stranded inside an underground parking garage.

RUNTIME 11´ 30 ”

LANGUAGE NO DIALOGUE

ASPECT RATIO 2.35 : 1

WRITER / DIRECTOR / PRODUCER

CHRISTIAN PFITSCHER

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

KURT UNTERHAUSER

CAST

THIEF CHRISTIAN BERTI

OWNER PATRICK LOCHMANN

THING KURT UNTERHAUSER

WATCH TRAILER HERE

WHERE TO SEE ?

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THE EXIT JOB

THE MAKING OF

A SHORT DIRECTOR´S INSIGHT

READ: 2 MINUTES

The initial idea about making THE EXIT JOB sparked during the shooting for our last feature project. We had two short scenes which played out at ground level of this parking garage. At day three of shooting we were running early, so we had to wait for rush hour for the garage to be filled with cars accordingly. But the scarcely filled parking deck had my imagination going. What if the deck was completely empty? And furthermore:

What if getting out of the garage would become the characters main challenge?

Although we did continue shooting our feature project, this scenario definitely grew on me. So I decided to come back to location two weeks later to have a closer look. I snuck into all of the four different parking levels, each level themed with its own color scheme. But only after I ended up at “-4”, I knew this was the right deck. The outer garage wall, all the columns and even the bold exit door were painted in such a fascinating, alarming red. It was just perfect.

We simply had to make this happen!

I proposed the idea to my team and invited them to wander through the garage all together. The vast amount of concrete columns, standing in full light and dead silence. We felt the creeps in here are made different than usual. Instead of the being-used-to threat lurking in the shadows, more of an omnipresent fear of the unknown is created. And it is possibly waiting behind each and every column.

We also discussed how much of an impact the soundscape could have on the later viewing experience. The script started out with minor dialogue, but I felt the opportunity was right to cut it out completely. Furthermore, I decided to have no music in it at all. A bold but necessary step towards weighing in on ambience, which in fact plays a major role in how we tell the story.

I tailored the script and storyboards to the layout of this very parking deck, which indeed was a leap of faith in terms of working ahead. But in retrospective, this was what helped us convince the landlord to give us permission to shoot at his garage, but not only.

We were granted exclusive access with full control over the whole parking deck!

Final preproduction was mostly about polishing the storyboards, have each and every column breath as individual characters.

One lesson learned is that the fewer words spoken, the more your audience is focused on what is shown. And as a completely dialogue free production, the devil would be in the details more than ever before. Colors for costumes were not left by chance, just as our characters cars were picked accordingly. After a couple of tests I decided to capture all of that wide space by shooting the whole film with a single anamorphic lens setup.

Ready to roll we were finished after eleven nights of shooting, with a total of approximately sixty hours. We dived right into postproduction with no reshoot necessary. Sound design was as important as ever, which is why we decided to record various foley and ambience, right on location. The most vital element definitely being the sports cars engine and exhaust sound. Our goal now is to showcase THE EXIT JOB at a variety of film festivals around the globe.

Speaking on behalf of the whole team, it would be a pleasure to meet you at one of these festivals in person and have a chat about films and future projects!

Yours sincerely, Christian Pfitscher